ALAMOGORDO, N.M. (AP) — When National Presto Industries Inc. stops making deep fryers and coated aluminum griddles here in August, the loss will be felt throughout the community.
General manager Tom Bernicke moved to Alamogordo from the company's headquarters in Eau Claire, Wis., in 1971 to help set up the sprawling mint-green factory. It opened in 1972.
"It's real rough," Bernicke said. "We've been here so long. A lot of my people have over 20 years. They're just like family."
Workers said they were shocked at the announcement in early January that the plant was scheduled for closing. Roughly 250 full-time and 100 seasonal workers will lose their jobs when regular operations end sometime in August. The city will lose roughly $6 million in annual payroll.
But making the closing even more bitter, local workers said, is the fact that production will be relocated overseas, in mainland China, to take advantage of lower labor costs.
Workers and local residents said it has always been a point of pride that the home-grown kitchen appliances, developed by a Wisconsin firm that first made pressure canning equipment, are made in the United States.
"It's sad to see an American-built product going to China. And with all that's gone on since Sept. 11, people want to buy American," said Gary Skiff, assistant store manager of the local True Value Hardware store, which carries replacement seals for Presto pressure cookers.
"My grandmother used a Presto pressure cooker," he said. "I still have my mother's that's 35 years old. I'm not knocking China, but you just aren't going to get as good of a product."
Graciela Monrreal, a Mexican immigrant who got work with the company 28 years ago at a time when she said she could barely speak English, said workers were "proud of the products, because it says right on the box 'Made in the U.S.A.' "
"If all the jobs go to China, what are we going to make?" Monrreal asked.
Bernicke said the move was necessitated by an increasingly competitive market and narrowing profit margins. Presto's main competitors — Sunbeam, Hamilton Beech, Salton, Black & Decker — all have moved kitchen appliance manufacturing plants to China over the last 10 years to lower costs.
Bernicke said he, too, is frustrated by the move. But while the Alamogordo plant's employees earn hourly wages generally between $7 and $11, Chinese workers will likely be paid weekly salaries of $5 or $6, he said.
"People in China can make our product and ship it to a central warehouse in Mississippi for less cost than it takes to buy the raw materials," Bernicke said.
Presto's plant in Jackson, Miss., is also closing.
"We were hoping for the best, that we wouldn't have to move," Bernicke said. "But you could see the writing on the wall as the (profit) margin got smaller and smaller from what we got from selling to the big chain stores."
Bernicke said the Alamogordo plant has always been highly productive. Trucks haul away 4 million finished items per year from the plant, including the company's signature deep fryers and electric griddles.
The plant's die-casting operations run 24 hours a day, consuming 6,000 tons of aluminum ingots each year. Clacking foundries heated to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit melt the ingots, and the molten aluminum is poured into molds.
The company is working with local and state economic development officials to find another firm interested in using the 160,000-square-foot plant. The plant's 15 die-casting machines could easily be converted from making FryDaddy pots to making other products.
"And they are willing to capitalize that project if it makes sense," said Ed Carr, executive director of the Otero County Economic Development Council, of Presto. "They want to keep the facility themselves; they want to keep it open. And the fact they have a facility and a work force that is already trained, we think, is a real advantage."
Carr is overseeing a campaign to market the plant. Local business representatives are planning visits to trade shows in El Paso and Los Angeles in the next two months where they will try to woo manufacturers to move operations to Alamogordo.
Plant workers said Presto has always been a good employer, and the news of the closure shocked them.
Presto provided generous bonuses three times per year, tried to accommodate employees in new positions when their first jobs were no longer suitable, and paid well, workers said. Reaching production goals meant celebrations after work. The company paid college tuitions of up to $10,000 per year for employees' children who maintained a 3.2 grade-point average or better.
Presto also gave to local charities, including hundreds of dollars each year to the city library for child literacy programs and a $100,000 donation to the Flickinger Center for Performing Arts.
"This is home away from home," said Jennie Berry, a quality control supervisor who has worked 28 years for Presto.
"We were babies when we started here," said Monrreal, a 50-year-old with nearly three decades at the plant. "Now we're grannies."
Workers, however, must now worry about getting by without Presto.
For supervisor Monica Gray, 47, the impact of the plant's closure will be felt doubly hard. Gray has worked for Presto for 20 years, and her husband, a maintenance worker, has logged more than 17 years at the plant.
Gray said she was hoping to get state-sponsored retraining for another job, if Presto cannot find more products to make. Some workers said they were not looking forward to the prospect of relocating.
"When you work here for 20 years, it's all you've ever done," Gray said. "It's hard to imagine other things."